Category: Current Events / Activism

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A poem on being trans during Trump’s return

An ink print on linen that features wildflowers growing from a sewage pipe and the text "another world is possible." Linen is framed by glowing stained glass that includes a dragonfly and rose. To the left of this frame is a vial of testosterone with a syringe needle through the top. Under the frame is a threaded needle; the thread is pink and loops loosely around the testosterone vial as well as a blue estrogen pill. The needle's point nearly touches one foot of a chromosome, which in turn blends into a strand of yarn wrapping into a ball of yarn.

The day after the inauguration
I give myself my hormone shot.

Every Tuesday since
I have done so again

in spite

of blowhards’ orders for
two sexes and impermeable borders.

Hrt — dear dermal border crosser — pays no mind 
to the blustering of fools who know nothing

of what it is to sew oneself 
into one’s body with a needle

pierced through thigh muscle; stitches across 
the chest; new names spun by fumbling fingers

into the threads that stretch heartstring to heart-
string. What could they who sever heartstrings know

of the transtemporal tapestry that interweaves
our unnumbered stories, our numberless ways to be?

Even now, they try

to tear our truth out of all legal records,
to blot us out from history and medical texts —

but we suffuse humanity’s warp and weft:
cut us out, mere tatters will be left.

And it may be they’ll pry

our protections and passports, our vials and blue pills
from our still-warm, still-alive, still-trans and intersex hands —

but our tapestry is stronger than their will,
twined tighter than chromosomes, and

we’ll give them hell for every sundered string.
We’ll fight like hell until their bitter end.

For now, it is Tuesday again

and my hand, with its wedding ring
and thickened skin,

is steady as I plunge the needle in.

You are welcome to circulate this poem around, including on social media (please make sure to include image descriptions if you share screenshots) or at any type of gathering. Please credit Avery Arden (they/ze) of binarybreakingworship.com.

I also ask that you keep in mind that this poem is first and foremost a personal piece; I am not attempting to speak to what other trans and/or intersex persons are feeling right now. What is more, I hope it is clear that none of the various things mentioned — hormones, surgery, document changes — are at all necessary to be trans; I only center hrt here because of how it has been a grounding ritual for me these past weeks.

I welcome conversation, and would love to hear about your rituals, your remembrance, your resistance.

(By the way, this post’s title isn’t the poem title; it’s untitled / the first line kinda serves as the title.)

More about the poem:

Since Trump’s intentionally overwhelming first-day flood of executive orders, I’ve been trying to sort my tangled-up feelings:

  • The rage and despair and dread inextricably mixed with love, and defiant dreams of a better world, and deepest pride in the vibrant, rebellious, eternal community of those whose very bodyminds expose Empire’s lie that humanity can be dichotomized.
  • The whiplash of mundanity in times such as these — the way “life as usual” can lure us into passivity if we are not careful; but also the way our everyday rituals and tasks (like my weekly hormone shot) ground us, and can even be little acts of resistance to nourish our larger, communal resistance.
  • The bitterness of all that could have been (and I’m not talking about a Democrat in the White House, upholding the same systems that enable a tyrant like Trump, just with more hand-wringing). The frustration that this is what it takes for more people to wake up to the evils that have festered in and fueled this nation from its conception. The relief that at least now there are more people ready to resist, and urgency to welcome and equip them.
  • The preemptive grief for all we will lose. The determination to lose as few as possible — to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Before finally managing to get this poem written out, I was able to channel some of that tangle into helping More Light Presbyterians write our statement on Trump’s executive order against gender diversity. Along with concrete actions we can take to support trans and intersex persons right now (see the link for those), one of the parts I wrote was a closing message of love and promise to my trans and intersex kin:

Hateful people want nothing more than to see you feeling hopeless and abandoned—but we promise you, there will always be people in your corner, ready to protect you with our lives. We will not leave you to fight alone, no matter how dire things get. Cling to your community, nurture your spirit however you can, and remember:

Politicians were never going to save us. We keep us safe, trusting in the love and solidarity of the One who created each of us with purpose and delight (Genesis 1:31; Psalm 139:14).

Categories
Confession and Pardon Current Events / Activism Liturgy

Confession of Western Christian complicity in Palestine’s plight

Collage on cream paper of various symbols of Palestine as well some of Judaism, including doves and pomegranates, poppies, watermelons, lemons, keffiyeh, the evil eye, oranges, and the Palestinian flag.
"With Love to Palestine" (2023) by Shereen Audi

As a church that aims to live into God’s call
to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly,
we must acknowledge where we’ve fallen short —

particularly when it comes to the horrors
that Palestinians have faced in a Western-backed colonial project
since the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922,
into the Nakba, or great catastrophe of ethnic cleansing in 1948,

and up through the present day,
in these many months of violence escalated to genocidal levels.

If our desire for peace is true,
we will let go of any false peace
built on top of silenced voices and disenfranchised bodies.

We will cease to cry “Peace! Peace!”
at a people that has not known peace for over 100 years.

As one step towards a true peace, let us confess together the ways in which, individually and collectively, through action or inaction,
we have aided and abetted atrocities
against fellow human beings with whom we share God’s image:

We confess our compliant silence
from inside the heart of Empire.

Allowing hopelessness to collapse us into inaction,
we shrug in despair as Western powers fuel our excess
with African, Asian, Latin American, and Arab suffering,
and the stealing and stripping of Indigenous lands
all across the weeping Earth,
including in Palestine.

We confess our complicity as Christians
with our long and ongoing marriage to Empire —

our bloody past of crusades and pogroms,
missionary schools, eugenics, and all kinds of evil
wrapped in a guise of Christian “love” —
that extends into our present.

We confess our ties to Christian Zionism
begun in the nineteenth century British Empire
and continued through our “progressive” theologies of the late 1900s.

We confess the ways we reduce all Jewish people into a monolith
instead of respecting the diversity of perspectives and allegiances therein.
We confess how we treat our Jewish siblings as pawns
in our guilt and savior complexes, our various redemption myths:

We imply our faith supersedes Jews’ own on the one hand,
while on the other, we twist the very real issue of antisemitism
into a weapon to forward our colonial projects and anti-Arab racism.

When nationalism and Christian supremacy
erect murderous walls and stifle the reality
of one Beloved Community of all human beings,
Forgive us, redeemer God. Move us into honesty.

In our complicity, we confess our willful ignorance,
our failure to seek out accurate information —
allowing vital stories to be silenced
or twisted into lies.

We allow ourselves to be lulled by pretty propaganda
lifting up modern Israel as a “promised land” for Holocaust survivors,
for environmental justice and queer inclusion,
because that feels better than the truth:
survivors silenced and kept in poverty;
desert biomes forced into European molds,
ancient olive trees obliterated,
and the searing truth that no place that enables racism and apartheid
can ever be a queer friendly or environmental paradise.

When fear or uncertainty keeps us from speaking up;
When we choose our own comfort over courageous conversations,
Forgive us, redeeming God. Move us into courage.

Finally, we confess a collective failure of imagination.

We have fallen for the lies that this conflict
is too complicated to resolve,
that justice is impossible,
that hope is dead —
instead of listening for Spirit’s wisdom
and noticing God’s inbreaking Kin-dom
in the vision and voice of Palestinians
who have never given up on justice,
on believing in peace,
on believing in a multicultural, interfaith future for the land.

Forgive us, redeemer God.
Move us to seek, center, and celebrate
Palestinian visions of justice and peace.

In repentance and hope,
we pray to the God of both Sarah and Hagar, both Isaac and Ishmael,
Parent of all peoples and protector of the oppressed:

Help us recommit to seeking your Spirit at work among ruins,
to lifting up the voices Empire aims to silence,
to God’s Kin-dom where all peoples, all Creation,
can live together in joy.

__

Friends, our shortcomings are great, but God’s love is greater.

In his invitation to peace
after his execution and resurrection,
Letting go of the betrayals of the past
in order to initiate a faithful future,
Jesus reminds us that it is never too late
for collective wholeness and healing.

Thus reminded and redeemed by the God who crosses every border
and tears down every wall,
we may extend the peace of Christ to one another — 

not an easy peace, not a halfhearted peace,
but a peace built on justice and mutuality —

both here in this space, and across the world.

The peace of Christ be with you…

Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!

You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.

About this piece:

We are many months into genocide, and misinformation still abounds; the USA and other Western nations continue to fund Israel’s violence; Palestinians continue to be bombed, starved, imprisoned, defamed.

We cannot lose steam; we must continue to speak up, to educate one another and get active till Palestine is finally free.

My hope is that this Confession can be one piece igniting further conversation and action in faith communities. If your community is not at a place where a confession like this could be shared in worship, make it the subject of a Sunday School lesson or coffee hour conversation instead.

For resources describing the various claims in this piece, see this post.

  • My top recommendation on Palestine & Christianity is Mitri Raheb’s book Decolonizing Palestine; read a summary of it here.
  • For discussions on fighting antisemitism while supporting Palestine, my top rec is Safety through Solidarity by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber.
Categories
Current Events / Activism LGBT/queer Prayers of the People Reflections for worship services

Beatitudes for the prophets who move our churches into truer welcome

To the ones who bear witness
to the church’s flaws and failings,
and still believe in everything that Church could be —
and work to make that holy vision real
though the labor is long, and tough, and often thankless —

Let us offer thanks,
remembering the unlikely blessings
our subversive Savior likes to lavish
on those the world least expects.

Blessed are you who make a way
out of no way: who pioneer a path
for those of God’s children who’ve been told they don’t belong
in the pews, in the pulpit, or in holy bonds of marriage.

Blessed are you when you come in bold and disruptive,
flipping the tables that make no room for you;
And blessed when you work behind the scenes,
change rippling out from constant conversation —

For we we need both: the Spirit of roaring flame, and gentle rain.

Blessed are you when your voice shakes
and you speak out anyway.

Blessed are you in patience, persistence, and grace;
Blessed also are you in frustration and righteous rage

For the psalmist joins you in crying, “God, how long?”

Blessed are you who endure judgment and scrutiny
from people who are meant to be neighbors in the Body of Christ

For the peacemaker’s crown, the friendship of God is yours.

Blessed are you when you tire,
and burn out, and wrestle with despair

For rest is your right, and others will take up your fight
as long as you need.

And when ignorant tongues defame you,
when they twist your words
and accuse you of being the divisive one,
when they try to shut you up and drive you out

Blessed, blessed are you!

For you belong to an unbroken line of prophets
stretching back to the cross
and forward to a feast laid out for all.

Yes! Blessed are you when “blessed” is the last thing you feel —
you who fight the good fight
even when it seems hopeless,
even when you lose, again and again,
even if you will not be around
when the drought on justice ends
and the fruits of your labor bloom into life at last

For future generations will remember you with pride.

For no matter how it looks right now,
your efforts are never in vain.

For you are part of what makes Church worth fighting for,
and what you sowed in sweat and tears,
tomorrow’s children reap rejoicing.

Blessed are you, for yours is the kin-dom
you are helping to build, one brave truth at a time.

Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!

About this piece:

The past few days have been rough ones for queer Presbyterians and those who love us. The 226th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) kicked off with the Olympia Overture, which sought to add sexuality & gender identity to a portion of our Book of Order that lists classes protected from discrimination; as well as to make it so candidates for ordination must be asked about their ability and commitment to uphold the “principles of participation, representation, and non-discrimination” found in that other part of the Book of Order.

Both parts of the overture ended up getting approved, but only after much discourse before the GA even began, and more debate before the committee. It was…really hard to watch (so hard that I didn’t watch most of it myself — but friends watching kept me informed of what was happening).

It was a reminder that there are people in my own denomination who, whether they would word it this way or not, don’t want to see me and my queer kin as fully human — to recognize us as called by God, as colleagues, as part of Christ’s movement in the world.

Also, part B only passed after the language was amended to take out the word “non-discrimination” — apparently the implication that a candidate might be discriminating against someone is Not Nice. I’m reminded how many of us — myself included as a white person — have it instilled in us from birth that it’s more important to be nice, and to avoid discomfort, than it is to call out harm.

But also, as many queer Presbyterians took their turn speaking — each granted just two minutes to make the case for their belonging, their right to have colleagues who recognize their equality in our church — I felt pride swell up deep in my soul. We are put through so much! We are scrutinized, we are shamed, we are accused of “causing division” just because we call it out — yet we remain faithful. We believe in God’s promise of justice rolling down, of a kin-dom where the last are first and the dignity and worth of all is recognized.

They can’t drive us out. We will stay, and we will persist in loving them back into their own humanity.

This prayer is for all the people across the decades, even centuries, who have fought in loud ways or quiet, in the spotlight or behind the scenes, to have their dignity recognized. For Black folk and queer folk, for women and immigrants and disabled persons, and for so many more, across all the different communities of faith.

We are Church. We are making the Church be what it was always meant to be. Blessed indeed are we.

Categories
bible study Current Events / Activism easter Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Today is Easter Sunday. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Today is day 176 of genocide.

This year the lectionary gives us Mark’s account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus’s body missing. And isn’t that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark’s account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they’ve seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire’s shadow?

A painting in a style resembling stained glass of three women standing over a coffin, which is empty except for strips of white and yellow linen. The women's hands are raised in confusion and shock.
“The Empty Tomb” by He Qi.

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I’m grateful that Mark’s resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the “already but not yet” experience of God’s liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ’s incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed… and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark’s Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

An art piece structured like a collage featuring an elegant figure wreathed in fire, with text around them reading "& like any goddexx you are scorned & become the fire anyway." The figure is pouring pitchers of water into a pool at their feet; green hills with various flowers stretch up around the pool.
Art by Amir Khadar, based off the poem “litany in which you are still here” by kiki nicole

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God’s Kin(g)dom.

Empire’s violence continues to overshadow God’s liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment’s rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter’s joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Photo of a blanket set with bowls of grass soup and slices of lemon
A photo of a Palestinian family’s meal, taken in Gaza.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God’s all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we’ve stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God’s Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world’s despised, over and over — till God’s Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

Painting of a woman playing a flute with several birds around her, as below her a line of Palestinians make their way up towards the city of Jerusalem. The colors are warm and bright.
Painting by Palestinian artist Fayez Al-Hasani
Categories
Current Events / Activism Holy Days lent

Two Palestinian Crucifixion Poems

Drawing of Jesus leading a group of people past chains, which are breaking apart as he raises his fist. A green dove flies above them.
A painting by Sri Lankan pastor Jebasingh Samuvel, who preaches and paints the Dalit-ness of Jesus.

In Jesus, God incarnate suffered and died on a cross, an imperial tool of torture, terror, and humiliation.

Ever since, some of the most dehumanized and oppressed peoples of the world have seen themselves in Christ’s execution. For them, Jesus expressed ultimate solidarity with all whom Empire criminalizes and murders — from the “untouchable” dalit class, to Black persons lynched or shot by police in the United States; and from Latin America’s “disappeared” across the 20th century to queer persons dying of AIDS in the 90s.

  • Drawing of Jesus leading a group of people past chains, which are breaking apart as he raises his fist. A green dove flies above them.
    A painting by Sri Lankan pastor Jebasingh Samuvel, who preaches and paints the Dalit-ness of Jesus.
  • Painting of Jesus in white and a crown of thorns being led in chains by military officers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their white handkerchiefs cry out in pain and protest, as do the mothers and fathers of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship. Signs on the wall demand to know where children, women, and other disappeared persons have gone.
    The first station in Adolfo Pérez Esquivel’s “El Via Crucis Latinoamericano” (“The Latin American Way of the Cross,” 1992). Christ is led in chains by military officers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83).
  • This painting depicts Jesus nude except for his crown of thorns, with one hand on his knee and the other cradling his head. His skin is gray and covered in AIDS lesions. A quote from Matthew 25 is written in the background of the painting: “Then the king will reply, whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did to me.”
    “Man of Sorrows: Christ with AIDS” (1993) by Maxwell Lawton. Archbishop Desmond Tutu loved and defended Lawton’s painting.
  • Charles Cullen’s frontispiece to Countee Cullen’s “The Black Christ and Other Poems,” 1929.

In the mid-1900s, the symbol of crucifixion was uplifted by many Arabic poets as an image of unjust, collective suffering. Decades later, in 2021, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish likewise made crucifixion the central image of his collection of poems Exhausted on the Cross.

Throughout this text, Darwish grapples with despair and uplifts resistance in the face of Israeli occupation, with all its “tedious” daily terrors interspersed with waves of escalated violence. He sees these decades of occupation as a long, drawn-out, collective crucifixion. When will it end? When will Palestinians know rest — and maybe, just maybe, resurrection?

I want to share two of the poems in Exhausted on the Cross.

Black-and-white photo of Najwan Darwish, a youngish man with short dark hair smiling at something out of view. Next to him is the cover image of Exhausted on the Cross, which doesn't have any illustrations.

“They Woke You at Dawn” by Najwan Darwish, 2021

In this first poem, Darwish imagines Christ as a fedayee, an Arabic term for various military groups willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger movement.

Palestinian Fedayeen are often smeared as terrorists by Israel and its allies, while their self-sacrifice is celebrated by the oppressed — not unlike how the Roman Empire viewed Jesus as a threat to be eradicated, while the poorest of his own people loved him. 

Darwish dedicated this poem, “They Awoke You at Dawn,” to Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian activist whom some see as a convicted terrorist – despite her confession being made under Israeli torture — and others see as a hero and representative of collective Palestinian denigration.

Photo of Rasmea Odeh, a middle aged woman with brown hair mostly concealed under a keffiyeh being worn as a headscarf. She's smiling big enough at the viewer that it crinkles her nose.

“They Awoke You at Dawn”

When they woke you at dawn,
when they hung you up for slaughter
. . .

Christ was a fedayee, just like you,
but he was condemned and crucified
in the sea of a single day, while you—
your cross is raised with every dawn.

His name was on their blacklist,
his mother slept on a pillow of nightmares.

Which of these few women outside the Moscovia jail
can catch her when she falls,
hanging as she is
from the farthest star of the cosmos?

They’ve woken you at dawn again.
They’ve hung you up for slaughter.

“Exhausted on the Cross” by Najwan Darwish

In this second poem from — and, as it happens, the titular poem of — Exhausted on the Cross, Darwish expands the image of crucifixion from a singular victim (e.g. Christ, Rosmea Odeh) to all Palestinians.

Darwish sees the long decades of Israeli occupation as a drawn-out, collective crucifixion. Christ’s suffering is their suffering; their suffering is Darwish’s suffering. When will Palestinians know rest — and maybe, just maybe, resurrection?

“Exhausted on the Cross”

The ones hanging
are tired,

so bring us down
and give us some rest.

We drag histories behind us
here
where there’s neither land
nor sky.

Lord,
sharpen your knife
and give your sacrifice its rest.

◆◆◆

You had no mother or father
and you never saw your brothers
hanging
from the cold talons of dawn.

You loved no one
and no one ever abandoned you
and death never ate from your hands.
You cannot know our pain.

◆◆◆

I’m not King David—
I won’t sit at the gate of regret
and sing you psalms of lamentation
after the sins.

◆◆◆

Bring me down,
let me have my rest.

Further Reading

Categories
Current Events / Activism Holy Days lent Other search markers

Gaza’s Gethsemane

Today is Maundy Thursday, when Christians remember Jesus’s Last Supper, his final meal with his closest friends before his arrest and execution by the Roman Empire.

Painting of the last supper in which Jesus and his disciples all have deep brown skin; they gather around a low table as Jesus raises up a large bowl. They look solemn.
“The Lord’s Supper,” from the JESUS MAFA project of Cameroon

Meanwhile, right now, in Jesus’ own homeland, millions suffer starvation and terror, displacement and death under Western-funded Israeli colonialism and continued military assault. Israel blocks food from reaching them, leaving Palestinians in fear that any “supper” they can scrounge up might be their last.

A tablecloth is spread with bowls of soupy grass and a few plates of lemon slices
A Palestinian Muslim family’s fast-breaking meal: grass soup with some lemon.

After their meal, Jesus led his friends into the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed in anguish, fearing all he was about to endure: criminalization, torture, and a painful public death.

Jesus prays on the ground, looking agonized and raising his hands towards the dark sky, as three figures sleep in the background.
Gethsemane – Matthew 26:36-46

Jesus begs his friends to “stay awake” as he wrestles — just to be present, to make him feel a little less alone. How do we respond to Jesus’ plea by “staying awake” to Palestine’s current agony?

A painting of a young person, maybe a teen, mouth open in grief as he kneels and holds a child's body in his arms. Buildings on fire form the backdrop. The boy's clothes are in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Detail from “Cry” (2016) by Mohammed Almadhoun.

That question also leads me to ponder another: how does God join Palestinians in their agony? Where is God in their suffering?

Palestinian Christian Mitri Raheb seeks to answer this question of where God is in his 2015 book Faith in the Face of Empire.

Photo of Mitri Raheb wearing clerical black with the white clerical collar, standing outside and smiling at the viewer. Cover of Faith in the Face of Empire, which features a painting of Christ on the cross with two other crucified behind him.

Raheb looks at the history of the Palestinian region, from ancient times to today, as a long chain of different empires — from the Assyrians to the Romans, Ottomans to Western-funded modern Israel.

He says that this long history of occupation is what gave Palestinians the ability to notice God where those in power do not: among the powerless. It is this revelation, Raheb declares, that has empowered Palestinians — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — to survive and resist Empire again and again.

Raheb writes about how in ancient times, the divine was made

“…visible and omnipresent in the empire with shrines and temples that represented not only his glory but also that of the empire. God’s omnipotence and that of the empire were almost interchangeable. He was a victorious God, a fitting deity for a victorious empire.

At the other end of the spectrum there was the God of the people of Palestine, whose tiny territory resembled a corridor in Middle Eastern geography. …This God was a loser. He lost almost all wars, and his people were forced to pay the price of those defeats. In short, this God did not appear to be up to the challenge of the various empires. His people in Palestine were forced to hear the mocking voices of their neighbors who taunted them, ‘Where is your God?’ (Ps 42: 3, 10).

The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see him. When his people were driven as slaves into Babylon, they witnessed him accompanying them. When his capital, Jerusalem, was destroyed and his temple plundered, they saw him there. When his people were defeated, he was also present. The salient feature of this God was that he didn’t run away when his people faced their destiny but remained with them, showing solidarity and choosing to share their destiny.

Consequently and ultimately, Jesus revealed this God on the cross, in a situation of terrible agony and pain, when he was brutally crushed by the empire and hung like a rebellious freedom fighter. The people of Palestine could then say with great certainty [that their God] ‘in every respect has been tested as we are’ (Heb 4:15).

For the people of Palestine this meant that defeat in the face of the empire was not an ultimate defeat. It meant that after the country was devastated by the Babylonians, when everything seemed to be lost, a new beginning was possible. Even when the dwelling place of God was destroyed, God survived that destruction, developing in response a dwelling that was indestructible. And when Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), that soul-rending plea was just the prelude to the resurrection…”

It is this revelation that God sides against empire, Raheb continues, that keeps the Palestinian spirit alive through horrible oppression. Though the world may call such faith foolish — how can you believe God is with you and that God will have the final say, when all evidence points to your abandonment and defeat? — it is wisdom to the oppressed. Raheb describes how this wisdom feeds Palestinian resistance, over and over across the millennia:

“The art of survival and starting anew is a highly developed form of expression in Palestine, and one I see daily. People’s lives, businesses, and education are interrupted by wars and the aftermath of wars over and over again, and yet I witness people refusing to give up, taking a deep breath, and beginning again. Logically, it is foolish, and yet there is deep wisdom in such a course of action.

I’m often asked by visitors how I can keep going. Everything seems to be lost, the land “settled” by Israel, the wall suffocating Palestinian land and spirit, the world silent, and hope almost gone.”

Raheb’s answer to them is that God’s presence in and among the suffering, and God’s promised resurrection, of renewal in the face of all terror and death, is what keeps him and his people going.

As we enter into these final days of Lent, I pray for hearts and minds opened to witnessing God’s solidarity with and resurrection for Palestinians suffering imperial brutality. I pray that the Palestinians will survive as they always have — “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8–9).

Categories
Current Events / Activism

Palestine: history, current events, ways to help

a poster titled "the world stands with Palestine!" featuring three figures with upraised fists in front of a globe and olive branches. One figure wears a keffiyeh hijab.
"The World Stands with Palestine" by shenby g for the Arists Against Apartheid project

I originally had these resources pasted to the end of poem, but by request I am pasting them as their own post now, with more links added.

Please feel free to recommend more resources. Let us all do our part — Palestine will be free!

HISTORY

CURRENT EVENTS

DREAMING OF A BETTER FUTURE

WAYS TO HELP

  • Urge your University/School/Organization to put out a statement denouncing Israel
  • Organize a Protest/Participate in a local one
  • While calling your reps, tell them that as a voter, you’re unwilling to support them in the upcoming election unless they urge the White House to take a stand against Israel and stop funding them
  • Share art/writing/films around Palestinian culture (see this tumblr post for Palestinian media to watch; I also recommend Oriented (2015) for an un-pinkwashed queer Palestinian story)
  • If you’re part of a union, ask them what they’re doing to urge their industry leaders to take a stand against Israel + pressure the White House OR urge them to start a strike/walkout/etc if they’re not doing anything already
  • Talk with your friends IRL about Palestine; keep spreading information on social media — don’t let talk of Palestine die down!
  • See if your city/state council has put out a statement in support of Gazans. If not, try to push them to do so.
Categories
Current Events / Activism My poetry

“What words can do” — A poem for Palestine

A photo of Palestinian professor Refaat Alareer on a green background is accompanied by a verse from a poem that reads "I pull up a lecture by Refaat Alareer, who believed in the power of a poem to soar above the rubble crushing its poet's corpse..."

Half a world away from me
they are killing a people they claim does not exist
using my taxes, my country’s ghoulish gifts —
our bullets and bone-eating phosphorous,
our bombs, and our blessing to use them ­—

they are killing the doctors to kill all hope of healing
they are killing the journalists to kill all calls for justice

and what can I do? With what can I fight
to end this nightmare I’m complicit in
by birthright?

All I have, it seems to me, are words.

I scrawl them on protest signs,
arrange them into stilted, inept poems,
deposit them into the answering machines
of politicians who persist
in signing over all our souls for oil.

they are killing the old women
with nothing left to their names
but tales of how things were

and, God! they are killing the children
who listen to the tales and spin
them into dreams of how things yet could be

And what, in God’s name, can I do? What
can all the words
winging forth from all the corners of the earth
do?

what dream can rise unscathed from so much ruin?
what song is not drowned out
by the drones’ constant humming?

I pull up a lecture by Refaat Alareer
who believed in the power of a poem

to soar above the rubble
crushing its poet’s corpse.

they are killing the poets
whose words are seeds are kites are embryonic deeds

In the lecture, his voice speaks
to me from beyond the grave, haunted
by that soft electric hum
endemic, it seems, to classrooms all over.

In the lecture, he is saying

there was an Israeli general
for whom one poem by Fadwa Tuqan
packed a punch more potent than the guns
of twenty enemy fighters.

In the lecture, he is pleading:

“Don’t ever say Tuqan was arrested
‘just’ for writing poems”

and how could I, how could I
do anything but promise him, “I won’t!”

when he himself was killed a month ago
“just” for nurturing the poems in others,
“just” for reeling those poems out,
slim and supple as kites, into the world?

what song or verse, what thin prophetic cry
can scale a wall eight meters high?
one built to be buffeted, bombed — and still fly.

In the lecture, he is promising

as long as we can imagine Palestine free,
we can unlock that future reality

from a classroom that is rubble now —
the IDF bombed his university in October.
They say it was an important Hamas site.

Maybe it was

or maybe it was a danger “just” because
its teachers, its students, kept slipping their poems
past checkpoint gates

filling the world with prophecies of freedom
that “just” might make
a battered but persistent people free.

they can kill children women journalists
they can kill doctors dreamers prophets poets
but still (we must believe!) the poem lives on.

So take up your pen, or take up Gaza’s song
and spread the word forth: Palestine lives on.

Please feel free to spread this poem around online or offline. Just credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

You can find me reciting this poem in video format on TikTok here and on Instagram here.

If you’re interested in more poetry for Palestine, check out my podcast episode here.

About this poem:

These last few months, I have been reading a great deal of Palestinian poetry. Poems are my heart’s language, and I have been deeply moved by the long proud history of Palestine’s resistance poets, who have used their art to defy the colonialist lie that there is no Palestinian people or culture. For decades, these poets have been targeted by Israel’s government because the power of their words cannot be denied.

Before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7, 2023, Professor Refaat Alareer was a professor of creative writing and world literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he worked to nurture his people’s creative powers and broadcast Palestinian poetry to the world through efforts like the We Are Not Numbers project.

Many of Alareer’s lectures are available on YouTube; around nine minutes into an introduction to poetry, he discusses how art helps us imagine what we have never experienced so that we can work to make those dreams reality. In it, he speaks to his students:

“We’ve never been to other parts of Palestine because of the Israeli occupation, but we’ve been told so many times by our parents and grandparents, especially our mothers, have been telling us stories about Palestine…the good old days how Palestine was, all nice and beautiful, unoccupied, un-raped… Our homeland turns into a story. In reality we can’t have it, we don’t have it. But it can turn into poems, into poetry, into literature, into stories.

So our homeland turns into a story. We love our homeland because of the story. …And we love the story because it’s about [class joins in] our homeland. And this connection is significant. Israel wants to sever this relationship between Palestinians and land, Palestinians and Jerusalem, and other places and cities. And literature attaches us back, connects us strongly to Palestine,…creating realities, making the impossible sound possible.”

When we look at the weapons the IDF wields, courtesy of imperialist powers like the United States, what are words? Why bother speak up? Alareer assures us that our words do matter. In the same lecture as above, he speaks of the Palestinian resistance poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), whom Israel arrested. Why, Alareer urges us to consider, would Israel feel so threatened by someone who wields no weapon but a pen?

“…We always fall into this trap of saying, ‘She [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!’ …So we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say, ‘She just wrote a poem!’ We shouldn’t be saying that.

Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that ‘the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were like facing 20 enemy fighters.’ … And the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back. She was put under house arrest, she was sent to prison for years.

And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry. …It took them years — over 50 years — of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money and everything else. But literature played one of the most crucial roles here. …Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was presented to the Jewish people around the world … [as] a land without a people to a people without a land. ‘Palestine flows with milk and honey. There’s no one there, so let’s go.’ … And there were people — there have always been people in Palestine. These are examples of how poetry can be a very significant part of life.”

Professor Refaat Alareer in a 2019 poetry lecture

It turns out that words are working — slowly but surely.

Since October 2023, the journalists and everyday people in Gaza who have been bravely broadcasting their stories to the world, and those across the world who have been spreading those stories, and organizing protests, and refusing to be silent in the face of government powers and heavy propaganda, are having an effect. Israel is concerned about its public image, which our collective words and actions are damaging.

So keep sharing Palestinians’ stories; keep writing; keep contacting your representatives; keep protesting.

We won’t stop till Palestine is free.